GregHowley.com

Reverse Spamming

May 11, 2005 - -

Today, when I got home from work, I found in my inbox a spam from techfiesta, telling me that I should let them design a website for me.

After checking the email's headers and looking for embedded scripts or image tracking and finding nothing deceptive, I determined that the spam was very unsophisticated. I then peeked at their site. Ugh! Table-based layout, deprecated attributes everywhere, no DOCTYPE, and worst of all - frames! This would have been a good design strategy in 1995.

So I replied to their spam, explaining to them how out-of-date their design was, attempting to educate them as to the value of web standards, and offering my services as a web designer. These people shouldn't be designing sites for anyone - they can't even do their own site the right way.

(I've used google's nofollow on techfiesta's link - they'll get no bonus traffic from me!)

Comments on Reverse Spamming
 
Comment Wed, May 11 - 10:39 PM by pmd
OK, Lancelot... Not the best way to get a gig, but I doubt that was your intent. Since they're spammers, I'd just assume it's some Romanian scam and be done with it. Techfiesta... is that when you take a fax machine to the middle of a field and hit it with a baseball bat until it stops flashing PC-LOADLETTER?
 
Comment Thu, May 12 - 9:08 AM by tagger
The TLD is registered to a company in Texas. At the moment, I can't even hit their site - my browser times out, and the lookup fails.

Professional bunch.